Bachmann Bellyflops

Michele Bachmann had been on an unbelievably good streak since her debate appearance in New Hampshire: poised, confident, presidential-seeming. But Bachmann is also famous for her flubs and misstatements, and you had to wonder how long the "new" Bachmann could maintain her image. We now know the answer: until precisely the point in her roll out this morning when she mentioned that her hometown of Waterloo, Iowa, is also John Wayne's hometown. ("That's the kind of spirit that I have too," Bachmann told Fox News.) While she it not wrong per se, she made a colossal flub nonetheless, because Waterloo is home to John Wayne Gacy, the infamous serial killer, and not John Wayne the movie star, who was born in Winterset, Iowa: